Last week I managed to escape the cold and wet UK weather by heading to Gran Canaria for the Ocean Optics XXVI conference, organised by The Oceanography Society.
I spent my days walking along the promenade to, and from, the venue which was located at the other end of the beach to my hotel. Early morning and late evening temperatures were cooler than the middle of the day, with a strong sea breeze accompanied by the sound of crashing waves coming onshore. You can see the approach to the venue in the image to the right.
I arrived on the Saturday evening and managed a swim on Sunday morning before the biennial conference began with an icebreaker reception in the evening. I’ve been to several previous Ocean Optics conferences over the years, and it was great to be back. I ran into several people I hadn’t seen for several years, alongside meeting up with new colleagues.
The conference had over 350 attendees and included oceanographers, marine ecologists, limnologists, optical engineers, marine resource managers, and Earth observation scientists. The conference formally began on Monday morning with a plenary lecture from Antonio Ramos of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, who showcased their work processing satellite imagery and collecting measurements from ships. He discussed climate change’s impact on upwelling systems, which are expected to have a reduced intensity. Also, the area has experienced blooms of Trichodesmium – also known as sea sawdust – it is filamentous cyanobacteria with cells that live as individuals or strong together in larger clusters.
The oral session following the plenary showcased the range of applications of optics data, with the organisers including different topics in each session, so we had glimpses into topics we knew more, and less, about. I particularly enjoyed David McKee’s talk on the impact of ship lights on microscopic and larger animals. Zooplankton (microscopic animals that live alongside the microscopic plants, phytoplankton) migrate to the surface at night to feed on the phytoplankton and risk less predation. When there are bright lights from a research vessel, they can alter their behaviour, thinking it’s the day rather than night – particularly in the dark Arctic winter. This means scientific sampling may not capture the non-disturbed situation, and in the clear waters sampled, this effect could be seen down to around 400 m. One way to reduce the impact of the lights is to use red rather than white lights, as it penetrates the water depth less, although it was also noted that acoustic vibrations could impact natural behaviour.
The keynote by Jeremy Werdell, held on Tuesday, was about NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission. I’ve known Jeremy for several years and remember when we both used to travel to Berlin to discuss the German MOS instrument that was being used alongside the Japanese OCTS instrument before NASA’s widely successful SeaWiFS mission went up. It was great to hear him reflecting on these historical missions alongside the excitement of a new ground-breaking mission – PACE is not only acquiring global hyperspectral datasets, but also carries two polarimeters. It is still within its commissioning phase, but the preliminary data is already being made available, and you can track its progression here.
I was presenting a poster in the Wednesday evening session, called ‘Mapping The Extent And Health Of Seagrass In Exposed And Sheltered Environments’ based on work Pixalytics is doing on two projects: Mapping Eelgrass Meadows in Swedish Coastal Areas and Visa4Sea (VISualisation and Assessment of water quality using an Open Data Cube FOR the weStern English channel), and was produced in conjunction with Susanne Kratzer, from Stockholm University, and Gavin Tilstone from Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
Every day of the conference was interesting, and my final highlight took place on the last day, when Susumu Takatsuka gave an impressive talk on using Sony’s event-based vision sensors to capture millisecond-scale behaviours of plankton. The advantage of these sensors is that they’re not recording from the whole image, just the locations where events occur. So, when data systems have limited storage capabilities, the data can be recorded much longer.
It was great to be at Ocean Optics again, but I certainly felt the temperature drop when I returned to the UK! I’m also looking forward to my final event of the year in December when I head to Finland for WHISPERS – the 14th Workshop on Hyperspectral Imaging and Signal Processing: Evolution in Remote Sensing – and will experience the cold rather than the heat!
